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President Truman on freedom, peace, prosperity and international cooperation

“There is not going to be any short-cut to preserving our own freedom or securing the peace fo the world through international cooperation of free and peaceful nations…
…I am confident that the American people have never been more strongly united in their determination to preserve our own freedom and to aid friendly nations…
…Our actions in the days ahead must reflect that unity and I am confident that all of you will do your utmost to see to it that a united American people overcome the obstacles and dangers which lie between us and our common goal of a just and lasting peace.”
TRUMAN, Harry S. Typed Letter Signed. Washington, DC, November 20, 1950. A substantial letter with excellent content from President Truman addressed to Dwight R.G. Palmer, an executive of the Democratic National Committee. In this remarkable letter President Truman makes a forceful and earnest request for support in building a secure and lasting peace in the early post-war period. This letter reflects what historians regard as President Truman’s greatest achievement, i.e., his success in building a secure and stable peace after the Second World War.

Rare 1861 third edition of Darwin's Origin of Species, a scholar's copy

The important 1861 third edition of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was the first to include Darwin’s account of the work of his predecessors.
“The great majority of naturalists believe that species are immutable productions, and have been separately created. This view has been ably maintained by many authors. Some few naturalists, on the other hand, believe that species undergo modification, and that the existing forms of life have descended by true generation from pre-existing forms.”
In the original publisher’s blindstamped green cloth gilt (with Edmonds & Remnants ticket); half-title, one folding plate, advertisement leaf at the end. Cloth a bit rubbed, some loss at lower spine, hinges holding despite some wear; generally a very presentable copy with an interesting provenance.
Provenance: Professor Martin Brasier (1947-2014), a celebrated palaeobiologist and author of Darwin’s Lost World: The Hidden History of Animal Life (published in 2009 as part of the Charles Darwin centenary celebrations). This copy with an inscription by Brasier: “used in Darwin’s study at Down House, Kent”. Also James Earl Moreton, F.R.C.S. (1831-1914), bookplate; Thomas W. Earl Moreton, gift inscription to G.B. Leach

Rare 1861 third edition of Darwin's Origin of Species, a scholar's copy

The important 1861 third edition of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was the first to include Darwin’s account of the work of his predecessors.
“The great majority of naturalists believe that species are immutable productions, and have been separately created. This view has been ably maintained by many authors. Some few naturalists, on the other hand, believe that species undergo modification, and that the existing forms of life have descended by true generation from pre-existing forms.”
In the original publisher’s blindstamped green cloth gilt (with Edmonds & Remnants ticket); half-title, one folding plate, advertisement leaf at the end. Cloth a bit rubbed, some loss at lower spine, hinges holding despite some wear; generally a very presentable copy with an interesting provenance.
Provenance: Professor Martin Brasier (1947-2014), a celebrated palaeobiologist and author of Darwin’s Lost World: The Hidden History of Animal Life (published in 2009 as part of the Charles Darwin centenary celebrations). This copy with an inscription by Brasier: “used in Darwin’s study at Down House, Kent”. Also James Earl Moreton, F.R.C.S. (1831-1914), bookplate; Thomas W. Earl Moreton, gift inscription to G.B. Leach

Signed by Annie Leibovitz

FIRST EDITION, SIGNED BY ANNIE LEIBOVITZ.
“I hate the word ‘celebrity.’ I’ve always been more interested in what people do than who they are, and I hope that my photographs reflect that. I have the opportunity to work with people who are the best actors, and writers, and athletes, and dancers–a broad spectrum. I feel like I’m photographing people who matter, in one way or another. I’m photographing my time.”–Annie Leibovitz, in an interview with Literal Magazine
Folio, original photo-pictorial boards, original glassine. Minor tears at extremities of rear glassine wrapper. A lovely copy.

"A girl who had everything...until she lost her life"

First edition superbly bound in modern morocco. She was young, stylish and beautiful. A girl who had everything…until she lost her life. Hercule Poirot recalled an earlier outburst by a fellow passenger: “I’d like to put my dear little pistol against her head and just press the trigger.” Yet in this exotic setting nothing was ever quite what it seemed. A fine copy.

First edition of Mario Puzo's masterpiece

First edition of Puzo’s masterpiece with all first issue points. Octavo. Original black quarter cloth, original dust jacket. Book fine, dust jacket uncommonly bright with only trivial wear to the extremities; small chip at the back top corner of the dust jacket. An exceptional copy.

“The world is a fine place and worth fighting for...”

First edition of perhaps Hemingway’s finest novel, in the first issue dust jacket. Octavo, original beige cloth, original dust jacket. Book about fine, dust jacket uncommonly bright with very minor shallow chipping to spine, few small creases to extremities. Overall an excellent copy.

First edition of Ayn Rand's magnum opus

First edition of Ayn Rand’s magnum opus and certainly one of the most influential books published in the 20th century. A superior copy with the original dust jacket, in the original green cloth. Near fine with text remarkably clean and text block solid (rarely the case with this stout octavo), small spot to front board; dust jacket bright and clean with few small creases and tiny chips; spine lightly toned, overall an excellent copy of a book seldom seen in such nice condition. All first issue points present.

First edition, with a lengthy inscription by Sherwood Anderson

FIRST EDITION, INSCRIBED AND SIGNED BY SHERWOOD ANDERSON.
“Dear David… One incident about the writing of this book will amuse you. The murder of Jim Gibson was written at the back of a little boat-laying place in Mobile Alabama while some sailors at a nearby table discussed the divinity of Christ. Sherwood Anderson.”
Octavo, original blue cloth. Dust jacket lacking. Spine sunned, light wear at spine head. A handsome copy with a superb inscription.

LIMITED EDITION, 1/1000 COPIES. Folio. Two volumes. Original paper wrappers printed in red and black. Original glassine. Complete with 14 plates by Alastair. An outstanding set with light wear to glassine wrappers.

“When you read this book, from page one you feel a threat following you, some animistic urging that keeps you going by the way McCarthy manipulates your demonic love of the sounds of speech. It’s seductive, the way shots of tequila offer the promise of danger, the way Shakespeare convinces you that even though Macbeth is up on the stage and you’re in the audience you’re thinking and feeling along with him, his bravado, his self-convincing, his descent, his death…” –Harold Augenbraum
FIRST EDITION of the first novel of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.
“Winner of the 1992 National Book Award and the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, Cormac McCarthy’s sixth novel, All The Pretty Horses, simultaneously recapitulates and transcends many of the themes, situations, structures, and characters of his earlier work…” (Arnold and Luce, Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy).
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. Octavo, original cloth, original dust jacket. A fine copy.

FIRST EDITION, INITIALED BY WARHOL ON HALF-TITLE. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975. Octavo, original cloth, original dust jacket. A fine copy in a very good dust jacket (slight blistering to jacket).

"A necessary part of any Civil War library"

“The grandfather of pictorial histories, this mammoth work is a necessary part of any Civil War library. The work contains 3,389 images that constitute an important source on the war’s appearance—its battlefields, common soldiers, officers, forts, diseases, camp scenes, army movements, and materiel.” Eicher, The Civil War in Books 771.
“The greatest single collection of Brady illustrations” (Allan Nevins). The Mathew Brady photographs represent the first instance of a comprehensive photo-documentation of a war.
New York: The Review of Reviews, 1911. Quarto, original blue cloth gilt. Ten volumes. An exceptional set, gilt uncommonly bright. Only occasional trivial wear to bindings. Very rare in this condition.

“Avedon gravitates to those moments in which the oscillation between pretense and revelation is most intense. The subject of any of his photographs is likely to show in part isolation or grotesquerie, courage to the point of madness, isolation-and-defiance or sly amusement, desolation and wit, pride and sterility, pride and triumph. Victories, defeats mingle in the same moment sometimes or on adjoining pages…” –Harold Brodkey (from the Introductory Essay).
FIRST EDITION. A spectacular production illustrated with Avedon’s photographs of Lauren Bacall, Joan Baez, Bridget Bardot, Audrey Hepburn, Anjelica Houston, Janis Joplin, Sophia Loren, Marilyn Monroe, Yves Saint Laurent, Elizabeth Taylor, Diana Vreeland and many more. A near fine copy with the original acetate jacket in very good condition with wear and chip at the top of the spine. An excellent copy signed and inscribed by Avedon.

FIRST EDITION of the tenth book in the James Bond series.
Octavo. Original cloth, original dust jacket. Book near-fine, leaning very slightly; with elegant bookplate on front pastedown. Dust jacket unusually bright with very light toning; very trivial traces of wear. A lovely copy.

FIRST EDITION in English, beautifully illustrated with 104 plates (64 in full color), and TWO ORIGINAL COLOR LITHOGRAPHS done expressly for this edition.
“All the time I was working, I felt my father and my mother were looking over my shoulder, and behind them were Jews, millions of other vanished Jews of yesterday and a thousand years ago.” –Chagall, on the creation of The Jerusalem Windows
Chagall’s Jerusalem Windows illustrates and chronicles the creation of the famous twelve stained glass windows, one for each of the twelve tribes of Israel, designed by Chagall for the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center Synagogue in Jerusalem.
Text and Notes by Jean Leymarie. Original red cloth, original pictorial dust jacket. Without the rarely seen publisher’s slipcase. Book fine, dust jacket near-fine with only a little edgewear.

FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING of what is considered to be Dick’s finest work and winner of the 1963 Hugo Award. A beautiful copy in the original dust jacket.First printing with D36 of page 239. Pringle, Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels, 37.
Octavo, original black cloth, original dust jacket. Book with slight bump at heel of spine and a hint of edgewear to dust jacket. A beautiful, bright copy.

Signed by Arthur Rackham

RACKHAM, ARTHUR; SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES.
The Springtide of Life. Poems of Childhood by Algernon Charles Swinburne.
SIGNED LIMITED FIRST EDITION, number 354 of only 765 copies signed by illustrator Arthur Rackham. Beautifully illustrated collection of Swinburne’s children’s poems, with nine mounted colored plates and 52 black and white drawings.
One reason why Swinburne never brought out such a collection was his failure to find an artist who could interpret to his satisfaction the simplicity and freshness of his verses. We are fortunate in having secured, in Mr. Arthur Rackham, one whose delicate and romantic fancy is in sensitive harmony with Swinburne’s, and who understands, no less than he did, ho ‘Heaven lies about us in our infancy.'” –Edmund Gosse, Preface
Quarto, original half vellum over parchment boards with gilt designs. Some soiling to endpapers, binding with only the slightest soiling; an exceptionally clean copy.

FIRST AMERICAN TRADE EDITION. Octavo. Original pictorial cloth lettered in gilt. Introduction by Theodore Roosevelt, foreword by Gilbert H.Grosvenor. With 8 full page illustrations, 100 illustrations in black and white, and color map bound in at rear. An excellent copy.

Signed by D.H. Lawrence, 1/500 copies

“So I should wish these Pansies to be taken as thoughts rather than anything else; casual thoughts that are true while they are true and irrelevant when the mood and circumstances changes. I should like them to be as fleeting as pansies, which wilt so soon, and are fascinating with their varied faces, while they last. And flowers, to my thinking, are not merely pretty-pretty. They have in their fragrance an earthiness of the humus and corruptive earth from which they spring. And pansies, in their streaked faces, have a look of many things besides hearts-ease.” – D.H. Lawrence
“Lawrence himself never took Pansies as seriously as his hostile critics, as his two introductions make clear: he called them ‘rag poems’” (Keith Sagar, The Art of D.H. Lawrence). Nevertheless, this unexpurgated edition, considered by Lawrence to be complete with the full introduction and fourteen additional poems, was published privately due to concerns about pornography. The manuscript had recently been seized by the English police for suspicions of obscenity, which Lawrence took as an insult and perhaps prompted the publication of this and another edition of 500 copies.
PRIVATELY PRINTED FIRST EDITION, number 48 of only 50 copies SIGNED BY LAWRENCE. Octavo, with frontispiece portait of Lawerence printed in brown. Title designed by W.G. West, printed in brown and blue, on Japanese vellum. Original soft grey/blue leather decorated in blue and gold, top edges gilt, others uncut. Bookplate of John Kobler (biographer of Al Capone) on frton pastesown. Spine faded, a little soiling to boards; original slipcase with a little fading and wear at edges; custom half-morocco box with gilt decoration on front board. A very nice copy. RARE.

Signed by W.B. Yeats, 1/1000 copies

SIGNED LIMITED FIRST EDITION of Yeats’s autobiographical work; one of only 1000 copies signed by Yeats.
“Looking back from 1922, [Yeats] titled his autobiographical account of the decade of the 1890s The Trembling of the Veil. He recalled that Mallarme has said that ‘his epoch was troubled by the trembling of the veil of the Temple,’ and that ‘as those words were still true, during the years of my life described in this book,’ he had named it accordingly” (The Cambridge Companion to W.B. Yeats).
Octavo, original half parchment over light green boards; original dust jacket. Dust jacket spine with light wear at the spine (slightly affecting label) and minor toning. A FINE COPY in the scarce original dust jacket.

“The Design which forms the Frontispiece to this book, and which is therefore presumed to be somewhat typical of the intention of Fable, represents Man tried at the Court of the Lion for the ill-treatment of a Horse. It will be seen that Man has the worst of it…”
Quarto. Hand-colored wood-engraved frontispiece, title and 22 plates by Swain after Charles Bennett. Finely bound in near-contemporary maroon calf. Light wear to spine and extremities; internally clean and nearly fine. A handsome and very appealing copy.

Signed and inscribed by Allen Ginsberg

SIGNED AND INSCRIBED BY ALLEN GINSBERG, WITH SUNFLOWER DRAWING. A later printing of Ginsberg’s masterpiece.
“In October 1955 Ginsberg read the first part of his new poem [‘Howl’] in public for the first time to tumultuous applause at the Six Gallery reading in San Francisco with the local poets Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, and Philip LaMantia. Journalists were quick to herald the reading as a landmark event in American poetry, the birth of what they labeled the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who ran the City Lights Book Store and the City Lights publishing house in North Beach, sent Ginsberg a telegram echoing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s response to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: ‘I greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript?’ Later Ginsberg wrote that ‘in publishing ‘Howl,’ I was curious to leave behind after my generation an emotional time bomb that would continue exploding in U.S. consciousness in case our military-industrial-nationalist complex solidified into a repressive police bureaucracy’ (Original Draft Facsimile Howl, p. xii).
Very nearly fine with only the most trivial wear to extremities.

“Hope faded as his radius of vision grew and the screen remained empty. Again and again he called into the lonely silence, while grief and helplessness strove for the mastery of his soul.”
FIRST EDITION, review copy. In a departure from Arthur C. Clarke’s usual medium of outer space, The Deep Range is a novel of the sea, and shows off Clarke’s “impressive talents as astronomer, deep-sea naturalist, and novelist” (from the dust jacket). Octavo, original green boards, original dust jacket. With review slip tabbed in. Book fine, light edgewear to dust jacket.

Signed by Al Gore

“A global environmental crisis threatens to overwhelm our children’s generation. Mitigating the crisis will require a planetary perspective, long-term thinking, political courage and savvy, eloquence and leadership––all of which are in evidence in Al Gore’s landmark book.”–Carl Sagan
FIRST EDITION, SIGNED AND INSCRIBED BY AL GORE: “For the grandchildren of Sally and Paul Robinson”. A fine copy in the original dust jacket.

Signed by Maurice Sendak

FIRST EDITION OF SENDAK’S THIRD BOOK, SIGNED AND INSCRIBED BY SENDAK. Gilt lettered red cloth, original dust jacket ($12.95 on front flap). Outside Over There is Sendak’s story of Ida, a pre-adolescent girl who must contend with sibling jealousy, new responsibilities and goblins who kidnap her young sister. A splendid copy, with Sendak’s enchanting illustrations.

“It’s just that I’d rather die of drink than of thirst.”

FIRST EDITION of the ninth book in the James Bond series, in colorful “skeleton” dust jacket designed by Richard Chopping.
Octavo, original black cloth with blind-stamped skeletal hand, original dust jacket. Book fine, small bookseller sticker at lower front paste down, dust jacket light toning at spine, small closed tear at spine head, small residue on back cover. A bright and handsome copy.

First edition of Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust

First edition of Faulkner’s powerful and influential novel on race relations in the American South, centered on the trial of Lucas Beauchamp, a black farmer accused of murder.
Intruder in the Dust “has the disturbing emotional power that [Faulkner] can generate at his best” ––Edmund Wilson
Octavo, original cloth, original dust jacket. Book fine; bright dust jacket with slightest edgewear; small spot on rear panel. A lovely copy.